Jeremiah

God calls His people to pass down the Christian faith to the next generation. Are you prepared for this high calling? Hi, Nathan W. Bingham here, and I'm happy to share that Ligonier has released a new Bible curriculum for children. It's called Growing in God's Word, and it features 52 lessons to help you guide elementary students through an overview of Scripture.

Explore all editions and learning levels today at growingingodsword.org. Don't worry. God is love. There's no judgment. Everybody goes to heaven.

God accepts you just as you are. He doesn't require repentance. How many times have you heard that? God says that's the message of the false prophets. One time, R.C.

Sproul recalled that he was asked by a man with a gospel tract in hand, are you saved? And Dr. Sproul replied, saved from what? You see, for the good news of the gospel to be good, there must be bad news. But often out of fear of rejection, we can be tempted to soften the bad news or scrap it altogether.

One man who faithfully delivered the word of God and didn't water it down, although he did deliver it with tears, was the prophet Jeremiah. And that's who you'll meet today on this Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and this week you're hearing messages from R.C. Sproul's series, Great Men to Live By.

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Well, here's R.C. Sproul on Jeremiah, the Weeping Prophet. One of the things that's fascinating to me about the prophets as a group of individuals is that though their tasks in many cases were commonplace and they shared in a similar mission, yet it seemed that in the providence of God, God chose men of completely different personalities and disposition to call into service as prophets. And I have to say that of all of the prophets of the Old Testament, the man that I find most attractive, the one I love the most, is the prophet Jeremiah. Those who are prophets of doom in our modern day society are often called Jeremiahs after the prophet Jeremiah because his task so frequently was to announce bad news to the people of the land.

He was announcing to Judah the impending destruction of the holy city, God's city, Zion, which was now going to be laid waste and the people carried away captive. Jeremiah has also been called the weeping prophet. Because what we find in the spirit of the man is a man who, even though he is pronouncing the judgment of God upon a nation and must speak boldly at times and very critically of his contemporaries, nevertheless always seems to deliver that message of judgment, not in a spirit of hatred, but in a spirit of brokenness, that he always pronounces the prophetic judgment in tears. And he cries day and night before God, pleading God's mercy on the very people who hate him and despise him. I think Jeremiah is the most passionate, the most sensitive, and the most emotional of all of the prophets.

and in him we find a man of unparalleled courage and devotion to God. His story starts in the first chapter of the book that bears his name, where we read of the call of the prophets beginning in verse 4. Here, Jeremiah is but a young man when God comes to him and selects him for this awesome task of being the one who brings the oracles of God to the people. Let's pick it up there in the first chapter, verse 4. Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed you in the belly, I knew you.

And before you came forth out of the womb, I sanctified you, and I ordained you a prophet unto the nation. There's something I want to say right before we go any further about this introduction to the call. God comes to Jeremiah and said, Jeremiah, before you were ever born, I knew you, not merely cognitively, but I knew you intimately. I set you apart. I consecrated you.

I ordained you before you were even born, and I ordained you to be a prophet to the nations. Does anybody know what tribe Jeremiah was from? That's question 51. Levi, good guess, but you just have now had 50 out of 51.

Okay, Levi was the priestly tribe, and it would be suggested, it's a good guess, because his father was a priest. And yet, for some reason, Jeremiah is identified with the Benjaminites. And what other great biblical character is famous for being a Benjamin? Benjamin, very great. Saul, Paul in the New Testament.

And Paul is also described as one who was ordained to his mission before he was even born. And Paul was consecrated from his youth. And Paul was called to be the apostle, what? To the Gentiles to the ethnoid to the ethnic groups to the nations In a sense he has the same call in apostolic circles in the New Testament that Jeremiah had in the Old Testament But when God speaks to Jeremiah like this, notice the prophet's response. Then said I, Ah, Lord God, behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child.

God, you can't mean it that you've ordained me to be a prophet. I'm too young. I have no gifts of public speaking. I haven't been trained in eloquence. Certainly, you have the wrong Jeremiah.

You must have got my name mixed up in the book of life somehow with somebody else that lives down the street. Why don't you go visit them and get the right fellow? Because it can't be me. I'm too young. and God says to the prophet, gee, I did make a mistake.

I'm sorry, Jeremiah. You are Jeremiah Ben-Hilkiah. I met Jeremiah Ben-Ebenezer and he lives down the road. I just made, excuse the ring. I'll get somebody else to do the job.

Is that what God said? You know that's not what God said. But God said to him, say not, I am a child For thou shalt go to all that I send you, and whatsoever I command you, thou shalt speak. Here in his awesome power and sovereignty, God calls this man, and really Jeremiah doesn't have a choice. This is what I created you for.

This is your destiny. I have called you, Jeremiah. And what I have called you to do, you shall do. You will go where you were told to go You shall speak what I've told you to speak You will do what I tell you to do Here is an overwhelming of Jeremiah By the sovereign God And then he says, don't be afraid of their faces For I am with you to deliver you, saith the Lord And then the Lord put forth his hand And he touched my mouth And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. And so Jeremiah is sent by God to deal with the leaders of the nation who are the religious and spiritual teachers of Judah.

Priests and the prophet. And listen to what we read. In chapter 23, the oracle of woe is pronounced. will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them. The priests, the pastors, prophets are not feeding the sheep.

He says that the false prophets heal the wounds of the daughter of Zion slightly. Band-Aids on cancer. My people are bleeding. They're dying for spiritual food and nurture and nourishment, but there's no boldness in the pulpit. No one dares to communicate the plain and the clear word of God to the people of God.

Because, dear friends, in Jeremiah's day and in today's day, the clear preaching of God's word, which people desperately need to be fed, is not a popular thing to do. And so we protect ourselves with our watered-down gospel that has no life and no substance. Or we'll be satisfied with platitudes, superficial, spiritual ditties that are communicated. God said, Behold, the days will come that I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a king shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. And in his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely.

This is his name whereby he shall be called the Lord our righteousness. But in verse 9 he says, My heart within me is broken because of the prophets. all my bones shake I'm like a drunken man and like a man whom wine hath overcome because of the Lord and because of the words of his holiness. Jeremiah is walking around stumbling as a man drunken. He's reeling because every time Jeremiah speaks the word of God he's greeted by a chorus of booze and disagreement by all of the other preachers in town.

And Jeremiah's a human being He's trying to stand alone And nobody wants to listen to him And the louder he speaks The more the opposition is heard From the other preachers And he says I'm reeling Battered Drunk Stumbling around Trying to keep walking For he says in verse 11 For both prophet and priest are profane Verse 14, I've seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem a horrible thing. They commit adultery. They walk in lies. They strengthen also the hands of evildoers. Can you imagine clergy publicly coming out and endorsing abortion on demand?

That an institutional church would do that? It's done regularly in this day. where it becomes the established church that sanctions unspeakable wickedness in the land. They strengthen the hands of evildoers. They are all of them unto me as Sodom and as the inhabitants of Gomorrah I will feed them with wormwood and make them drink the water of Gaul for from the prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness gone forth into all the land And thus saith the Lord of hosts, hearken not to the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you, for they make you futile.

They speak a vision of their own heart and not out of the mouth of the Lord. They say still unto them that despise me. Listen to this. they say still, or they continue to say, to those that despise me, the Lord has said, you shall have peace. And they say to everyone that walks after the imagination, the wicked imagination of his own heart, no evil shall come upon you.

Don't worry. God is love. There's no judgment. Everybody goes to heaven. God accepts you just as you are.

He doesn't require repentance. How many times have you heard that? God says that's the message of the false prophet.

Now, here's the crunch. Verse 28. A prophet that has a dream, let him tell his dream. But he that hath my word Let him speak my word faithfully What is the chaff to the wheat Sayeth the Lord This is a message to Jeremiah Hey Jeremiah Quit worrying about the false prophets I've given you a job to perform I've put my words in your mouth You do what I tell you to do You speak the truth Never mind what everybody else said If you have to stand alone, stand alone Let these guys go around with their dreams and their visions Let them tell you, I didn't send them And they cried, peace, peace When there is no peace You see, the enemy were at the gates of Jerusalem Ready to come in and destroy it And Jerusalem's clergy Seemed like a collective Neville Chamberlain Leaning out of their balcony saying We have achieved peace in our time. Nobody wanted to listen to Jeremiah because he wasn't preaching good news.

He was preaching bad news. And the false prophets were characterized then as they're characterized now by this. The only gospel they preached, the only message they delivered was the one they knew the people wanted to hear. Nobody wanted to hear that God was going to judge the nation, that they were going to go into captivity, that struggle was coming in a terrible time. Who wanted to hear that?

That God was angry? People wanted to hear that God was love. People wanted to hear that you could do your own thing with impunity. People wanted to hear that things were progressive.

Now, we're not bound by the old traditions that God thundered from Sinai. that worked then, but we can now go out and enjoy free love if we'd like. It's all right. Quiet. And the people would say, gee whiz, pastor, you're so understand.

You're so loving. You're with it. And the more Jeremiah preached, the more hated he became.

So that he says, in what I think is most characteristic of his life and of his personality, of his sensitivity. When I say that the prophets are men to live by, the thing that I see in them the most is that these are men who are willing to suffer humiliation for God's sake. That they're willing to be hated for righteousness. And there's not one Christian in a thousand who is willing to bear the reproach of Christ. that's where we compromise every day.

We want to be popular. We want people to like us. We are creatures who are created to love and to be loved. We don't want to hate anybody, and we don't want anybody to hate us. In the fragileness of our personality, we naturally cling to peace and to love and to flee from conflict and reproach.

Jeremiah was no good. Jeremiah wasn't like Amos, tough, thick-skinned. Every time there was a criticism, it seemed that Jeremiah felt it in his heart. He seemed like the least suitable person in all of Jerusalem to be called to this task. of a negative message.

He cried all the day long. And finally, in verse 7 of chapter 20, he said, Oh God, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived. As I've said many times, the Bible is the master of understatement. Here is an utter redundancy. I mean, here is a prophet who speaks nothing but the word of God.

Why waste words? Or something as superfluous. You have deceived me, and I was deceived. If God deceives you, you have been deceived. There's no question about that.

It adds nothing to the text. You have overwhelmed me, and I am overwhelmed. You bet I'm overwhelmed. When God overwhelms you, you have been overwhelmed. I am in derision daily.

Everyone mocks me. Everywhere he went There's Jeremiah Lousy Jeremiah Everybody was calling him the false prophet He was considered the weirdo He was considered the nut In the neighborhood I've been deceived God What kind of a job is this? You said you'd be with me To deliver me Is this deliverance? For since I spake I cried out I cried violence and spoil Because the word of the Lord Was made a reproach unto me and a derision daily And then I said, Jeremiah says it. God doesn't say it through his mouth.

This is Jeremiah speaking now, folks. Then I said, I will not make mention of him nor speak any more in his name. I quit. I've preached that message long enough, God Get yourself another boy I turn in my prophet's card It's all over I've had it Who needs it? Look, God, I'm a human being I love you But do I have to walk the world Cloaked in derision every day?

Jeremiah is going through all of this daily They put him in the stocks They make a public spectacle out of him People go by and spit at him He was despised and rejected of men And so he says, okay God, I quit Then said I But his word was in my heart As a burning fire Shut up in my bones And I was weary with forbearing and I could not stop. Jeremiah says, oh, I don't ever want to preach again. But I've got fire in my bones because you put your word in my bones and you put it in there and there's no way of getting it out of there because it's sitting there like a burning fire. Oh, shut up. God, is there some way you could take that fire and put it out so I can have some peace?

Because as long as that fire is in my bones, I have to speak and I have to preach and I have to go on and on and on. And Jeremiah saw what nobody else saw. He saw the end of the holy city. He saw the invading forces at the gates of Jerusalem. He knew that the hour for Israel's judgment had come and that everything that was precious, everything that was holy was going to be utterly desolate and that the land would be scorched and the people would be carried away into captivity.

And before those people came in there, Jeremiah goes out and does what? He buys a field. Invests in real estate in Jerusalem because God told him that someday that judgment would turn to blessing and God would return his people and out of that remnant would come a new covenant where the word of God and the law of God would be written on the heart, and we are the heirs of that field. We are the heirs of that covenant. We have the word of God in our bones and in our heart.

We have seen through the pages of the New Testament Those things that Jeremiah only dreamed of saying And yet In tears daily He was faithful To the word of God He's my hero Because he didn't quit and everyone in here if you ever stick your neck out you're going to know that same scorn and that same derision and you're going to want to quit and many of you have already quit that's why we needed Jeremiah to show us what it's like to be heroic to be bold and fearful, never hateful and spiteful. He was R.C. Sproul's hero because he didn't quit. This is Renewing Your Mind on this Tuesday. I'm Nathan W.

Bingham, and I'm glad you're listening today. A brother or sister in the Lord who is just a little bit further in their sanctification, can be such an encouragement to spur us on in our own walks. It's why being part of a local church body is so vital for healthy growth. The examples we see in Scripture, like the lives of the prophets, also serve as reminders to both convict and encourage us.

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So far this week, we've considered Elijah and the weeping prophet Jeremiah. While tomorrow, R.C. Sproul will turn our attention to the prophet Micah.

So be sure to join us Wednesday here on Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.